Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

That time when a burning B-52 nearly caused a Nuclear Catastrophe, worse than Chernobyl...Tonight on Sept 15, 1980: at Grand Forks AFB, North Dakota, the number five engine on the right wing of a B-52H on ground alert caught fire during a drill. The aircraft was loaded with 8 Short-Range Attack Missiles (armed with 170-200-kt W69 warheads) and 4 B28 bombs (70 kt to 1.45 Mt).

That night, a southeast wind gusted up to 35 mph. The B-52 pointed in that direction. That alone kept the flames away from the fuselage. Had the nose been facing west, the fire would have incinerated all six crew members as they evacuated and engulfed the weapons in the bomb bay.



Because the crew did not follow the correct procedure to shut off the fuel lines before evacuating, the fire burned for three hours. Eventually, a crew member broke through the fire line, climbed into the B-52, and properly engaged the shutoff valves, extinguishing the blaze.

A USAF veteran who was a police officer at Grand Forks AFB at the time of the fire and suffers from PTSD as a result told the VA in 1994 and 2011 that he was ordered to shoot KC-135 pilots who refused to move their tankers away from the burning B-52.


On appeal from the Department of Veterans Affairs Regional Office in Lincoln, Nebraska: (excerpt)

Finally, the Board observes that a single VA examiner authored seven negative nexus opinions in this case, dated September 2010, February 2011, September 2011, April 2012, June 2013, October 2013, and December 2013.  The Board finds that examiner's opinions to be inadequate because he made numerous inaccurate findings, and failed to consider the Veteran's  rapidly decreasing pattern of worsening behavior in service immediately following his documented B-52 stressor-as observed by VA clinical psychologists in December 2012 and March 2014.  For example, this examiner wrote in September 2010 that,

The Veteran was exposed to a situations [sic] where there was NO ACTUAL THREATENED DEATH.  Certainly the military plane caught fire.  It did not explode the ordinance or worse yet the nuclear weaponry.  Had that happened it would be an actual threatened death or serious threat to the physical integrity of self or others.  Also, his reaction is inconsistent with intense fear, horror or helplessness.  He acted properly while the others were described as cowards.  [Emphasis in original.]

This opinion is incomprehensible, as it is clearly facially reasonable to fear death when faced with an aircraft carrying nuclear weapons that catches fire.  The fact that the Veteran properly performed his duties under these stressful conditions is extraordinary and admirable, and not a reason to deny his claim.

Further, the examiner's September 2010 statement that "The Veteran appears to try to intimidate me from the very beginning of this examination....I did not want him to hurt me because I am just an examiner," conveys a troubling impression.  Likewise, the examiner opined in December 2013 that the Veteran "provided one of the most blatantly exaggerated protocols for the SIMS that I have ever seen....This, in my opinion, is not confusion, but rather blatant exaggeration for secondary gain."  In light of the Veteran's confirmed stressor, his reaction thereto during service, his multiple diagnoses of PTSD, and his multiple positive nexus opinions by VA and private clinicians, the Board finds that this examiner's opinions warrant no probative weight.

In light of the foregoing, the Board finds that the evidence is at least in equipoise as to whether the Veteran's PTSD is related to service.  Thus, resolving all reasonable doubt in the Veteran's favor, the Board finds that service connection is warranted for his PTSD.  38 U.S.C.A. з 5107; 38 C.F.R. з 3.102.

ORDER

Service connection for PTSD is granted.

This unnamed veteran first sought treatment and benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs for service-connected post-traumatic stress disorder caused by this accident in 1994. His claim was denied multiple times until an appeals board finally granted it in August 2016.


In 1988, then-Livermore Laboratory director Roger Batzel told the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee that if that the fire had reached the bomb bay, the high explosives “would have detonated” and plutonium would have been scattered across 60 sq. miles of North Dakota and Minnesota.

FIRE ON BOMBER IN 1980 POSED NUCLEAR RISK (Aug 13, 1991)

"You are talking about something that in one respect could be probably worse than Chernobyl," Batzel said, referring to the Soviet nuclear reactor accident that spread radiation over a wide area.

"Is that right?" said Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.).

"Yes, because you have plutonium in the soil and on the soil, which you have to clean up,'' Batzel said. ''I wouldn`t want either one."

Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) asked: "That particular fire caused enough heat, then, that it would have caused this?"

Said Batzel: "Yes, the aircraft burned for hours."

Batzel said the "high explosives which are in those particular warheads would have detonated. It would have happened in that environment."

"Do you know that through testing?" DeConcini asked.

"Yes, sir," Batzel said.

Batzel, now retired, refused to be interviewed for this article. But Robert Peurifoy, a retired vice president of the Sandia nuclear testing lab in Albuquerque, N.M., confirmed the outline of his testimony.

If that was not bad enough...not mentioned by Batzel, a design flaw in the B28 bomb meant that if exposed to prolonged heat, two wires too close to the casing could short circuit, arm the bomb, and trigger an accidental detonation of the high explosives surrounding the core, setting off a nuclear explosion.


That would have destroyed Grand Forks (home to ~44,000 people in 1980) and showered Duluth or Minneapolis-St. Paul with lethal fallout, depending on which way the wind was blowing. The USAF subsequently determined the engine fire was caused by a small missing nut on the fuel strainer.

At the time, more than 200 nuclear gravity bombs and Short-Range Attack Missiles (SRAMs) were deployed at Grand Forks AFB. Not including the 150 nuclear-armed Minuteman III ICBMs deployed in underground silos surrounding the base.

In 1990, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney ordered SRAMs removed from all alert bombers after all three nuclear weapons laboratory directors warned its W69 warhead posed an unacceptable risk in case of fire, an extreme danger they had first warned the DOD about in 1974.



However, SRAMs were not actually removed from the nuclear stockpile until 1993. In 1999, the last W69 was dismantled at the Pantex Plant in Texas. But not until early 2016 were all of its thermonuclear secondary components finally disassembled at the Y-12 Plant in Tennessee.



After years of stalling by the DOD which put nuclear warfighting ahead of safety, B28 bombs began receiving a safety retrofit in 1984, although the work halted a year later when funds ran out (resuming only in 1988). In 1991, the B28 was finally retired after 33 years of service.


The History Guy remembers the day we nearly irradiated North Dakota and the B-52 Fire at Grand Forks Air Force Base in 1980.




Meanwhile, North Dakota is boring until you see a nuke on the move.



That vid clip is one of 26 Air Force Payload Transporters, which are used to emplace, remove, and transport the multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) used to arm our 400 operational Minuteman III ICBMs. The vehicles are nearly 67 feet long just over 10 feet wide.

Also, previous movements of US Air Force payload transporters that received more than a little public attention:


Daily Mail - A USAF payload transporter, moving either W78 or W87 warheads for the Minuteman III ICBM to or from Malmstrom Air Force Base, was sighted driving through Great Falls. It’s only "incredible" if you don’t know nuclear weapons are routinely in transit by both truck & rail.

Here's a video via Air Force Times of another USAF payload transporter from 2015 (also in Great Falls, Montana) getting rear-ended by one of its security escort vehicles as it slows down to observe people recording IT driving through town.

Meanwhile, the British opt for lower profile without all the lights & sirens blaring when moving warheads from Atomic Weapon’s service in Berkshire to the Sub base on the Clyde and back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xAWZYvEQVc


Sept 15, 1961, season 3 of "The Twilight Zone" began on CBS with "Two." Written and directed by Montgomery Pittman, it tells the story of two wary soldiers from opposing sides, approach each other suspiciously, the sole survivors of a global thermonuclear war five years earlier who meet in a rubble-strewn city.






Sept 15, 1969: "Laugh-In" awarded its Flying Fickle Finger of Fate to the Pentagon and Congress for wasting $9 BILLION on six nuclear weapons programs: the B-70 bomber, the Nuclear-Powered Airplane, Snark and Navaho cruise missiles, Dyna-Soar spaceplane, and the Skybolt ALBM...




...And coincidentally, Peter Sellers was one of the guest stars in this episode, which opened the third season.



Can't help notice the swastika within. LOL.


"The Green Man" is a Earth’s first extraterrestrial visitor, a strange green man from a planet a trillion miles away, with a prophetic message for all the people of earth—to be delivered during halftime at a Notre Dame football game!


The author Harold M. Sherman (1898-1987) was a US psychic researcher, journalist from about 1921, screenwriter, and playwright as well as an author. He later became known almost exclusively as a science fiction writer for work published in Amazing Stories, most notably "The Green Man" and its sequel, "The Green Man Returns" in which the visitor from space tries to bring peace to a recalcitrant Earth.